Sunday, November 9, 2014

I have started working on getting the information from the Tech Sunday posts into PDF for Quilt Path Camp. I have finally gotten them all in a single, very large, PDF. It is a VERY rough draft. I am hoping to start editing it after the next Quilt Path Camp, which is starting on Tuesday. In a perfect world, it will be done before the Great Texas Quilt Path Camp Road Trip in January.

Eventually it will be in the order that I teach Camp. But for now, it is in the same order as the list on the Quilt Path tab of my website. There are lots of typos and the formatting changes many times. At some point it will be come a shiny, pretty document, but for now at least it is all in one place.

Sunday, November 2, 2014

This week we are talking about mirrors. Mirrors are used to duplicate design elements when created designs. To play with mirrors we will need to go into PatternCAD. From the Home screen, under Design & Create, tap on Pattern.

On the right side of PatternCAD, we will be working in Draw under the Mirrors heading.

You want to make sure the Mirrors button is selected so that you will see the reflections.

You will notice that some of the buttons look familiar. Let's start by drawing a straight line. Make sure the Node Spacing is off.

The Double Sided button is not selected. When you draw a line you will get a single bold green line.

Now switch to Draw under the Pattern heading. And draw a single line that bisects the mirror line.

It really does not look like anything has happened. This is because we do not have a second mirror line to reflect what we did on the first line. Go back to Draw under the Mirrors heading and draw a second line.

You will now see the line and the reflection of what you drew on the first mirror. The bold green line is the initial mirror line.

Now let's see what happens when we draw with the Double Sided button selected. When you draw a line with Double Sided selected, it looks just like it does when it is not selected, the difference happens when you draw on it. Now got the Draw under the Pattern heading.

Notice that I get a reflection of what I am drawing on the opposite side of the mirror line.

When I add a second mirror line I get a reflection of the entire design.

If I turn off the Double Sided option, I get a reflection of just what I initially drew.

It is easy to think that the mirror feature is not working, just by choosing an option incorrectly. Just drawing a single mirror line, does not really do anything for you. You need to switch to the Pattern drawing tools to get anything to happen. If you are using Single Sided mirrors you need multiple mirror lines to see anything happening. Double mirror lines make things happen on both sides of the line and can also be used to create multiple motifs on addition lines.